


hoping someone's at my fingertip that can help me understand

by hotmesslewis



Series: Lewis and Clark - Reincarnation [3]
Category: Historical RPF, Lewis and Clark
Genre: Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, F/M, IDGAF, M/M, Okay So I Contradict History For That Sweet Sweet Implied F/F Ship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-04
Updated: 2017-10-04
Packaged: 2019-01-09 02:17:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12266877
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hotmesslewis/pseuds/hotmesslewis
Summary: Part 3 of the Reincarnation series.  William Clark tries his best to understand and accept.





	hoping someone's at my fingertip that can help me understand

**Author's Note:**

> So Julia Hancock and Harriet Radford were actually cousins, I know, but I changed that for the sake of the story and my own Reasons.

“Hello?”

“Thomas Jefferson speaking.”

“My god, it actually _is_ you, isn’t it?”

“ . . . yes, I suppose it is.”

“Sorry, I just— I mean, he said, but I thought he was lying or crazy, one of the two, I didn’t know that it would _actually_ be you, sir.”

“ . . . ”

“Sorry.”

“May I inquire as to who is calling?”

“Right, of course, sir. This is Bill Clark, and I was wondering if you’d happened to have Meriwether Lewis’s number handy?”

“Bill Clark. ‘Bill’ being short for ‘William?’”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good Lord. So he finally found you.”

“Yes, sir? I mean, has he been looking for me?”

“For years, yes, of course. He’s always claimed to be looking for something other, but we know that he’s been searching for you. Lewis and Clark—they kind of go hand-in-hand, don’t they? Not that I’m necessarily implying anything.”

“Really? He’s been looking for _me_?”

“Naturally. Only . . . he hasn’t told you any of this, has he?”

“Um, well, we met in a bar, and after we didn’t, uh, have much time for conversation—” the voice on the other end of the line cleared its throat, embarrassed “— and I mean I didn’t even get his number, and I couldn’t find him listed, but I found your name, and he did mention you, briefly, last night . . . ”

“Did he? I’m flattered, particularly since he was apparently well-occupied with other things.”

“It wasn’t like that,” Bill Clark mumbled, mortified.

“You wanted his cell number, though? Hold on, I know I have it somewhere . . .” There was a shuffling of papers, turning of pages on the other end of the phone, and then the man gave Bill the telephone number. “One last thing, William—has he explained it to you, who we are, how we suspect this works?”

“He has. I’ve, uh, been doing a bit of reading on my own about it all, too.”

“But do you believe him?”

“I’m not sure,” Bill answered honestly.

-

The mechanized ring of his cell phone sounded like the telephone bells of hell itself, Meriwether Lewis considered groggily as his hands fumbled over the floor beside the couch in search of the offending phone. His eyelids were too heavy to open, though he knew they’d probably help him find it quicker. Finally his fingers found the ringing, vibrating little bastard and he was forced to open his eyes to check the caller ID.

The sun was too bright. It felt like someone was inside of his head, pushing needles into his eyes from behind them. Who the hell would call him at this time of morning?

He squinted at the phone. It was 11:36, incredibly late for the early riser that he was. _So much for this time of morning._

The number was unidentified, and Meriwether flirted with the idea of letting the phone ring out even as he answered it.

“ ’ullo?” His voice sounded too deep and too loud.

“Hi, um, Meriwether?” It was a man’s voice. Meriwether sat up and rubbed irritably at his eyes and stared at the debris of the night before. One two three four empty cans of Pabst’s Blue Ribbon in the floor. He stretched out an arm and another empty can tumbled from its place of honor, balanced carefully on the edge of a lampshade. Five.

That probably explained the splitting headache, then.

“Yeah, this is he. Him. Whatever.”

He’d had, what, three at the bar, too? But they were probably out of his system by the time he’d had the others.  Weren't they?

The bar.

There was something important about the bar.

“Hey. It’s me.”

Meriwether tried to think of some man he knew who would call and only identify himself as “me.” The way the sunlight came in to the cracks of the walls in the barn and glittered off the beer cans distracted him.

“Bill Clark? We met at the bar last night? And then I, uh,” the voice dropped, “went back to your place?”

“Holy hell.”

There were alcohol-soaked memories of a bar fight, and him making out with a gorgeous redhead on this couch, and then the sharp sting of disappointment.

That explained the binge he went on last night.

“Hi. Bill. Hi.”

“Hi.”

“Did I give you my number? I don’t remember giving you my number.”

“Um, no. But I got it from Thomas Jefferson.”

“Shit.” Mr. J would never let him live this down.

“Yeah,” Bill laughed, embarrassed. “I wanted to call, though, because I’ve been doing some reading this morning and I kind of had a question.”

“Okay.”

“Did I break your heart? He. Clark, I mean. Did Clark break Lewis’s heart?”

“I’m sorry, what?”

“Sorry. I was just wondering.”

“If Clark broke Lewis’s heart.”

“Yeah.”

“When?” Meriwether asked, bewildered.

“When . . . they were together. In the past. And then Clark went off and got married.”

Something in Meriwether’s mind clicked into place. “You’re just now starting to realize the impact of your actions, huh?”

“They weren’t my actions. They were his actions. I am not him, whatever you might think.”

Meriwether pushed him, testing a theory. “Is it the guilt or what, Clark?”

“It’s not anything! I haven’t done anything wrong. We weren’t even together like that then!”

So pushing him did work; Bill had used the first person. “Together like what?”

“Like . . . we were last night.”

Meriwether’s words caught in his throat.

“Do you remember last night?” Bill prodded, anxious. “Wasn’t it strange, how good it all felt?”

“I couldn’t forget if I tried.” And he had tried, apparently.

“Is that how . . . things were supposed to be between them, do you think?”

“I don’t know.” He wanted desperately to say yes, but William Clark had always had other loves. “But that wasn’t the question you called to ask.”

“Right. Yes. Did William Clark break Meriwether Lewis’s heart?”

“That’s rather presumptuous, isn’t it?” Meriwether asked coolly.

“I didn’t mean it like that. I just meant, well. Clark married, had kids, lived a long life. Lewis never married, never really seemed serious about anyone, and killed himself—” Meriwether could hear Bill regretting the choice of words; it seemed more violent, but maybe it was more honest, “—at a really young age. And I don’t know, reading about it all I just had to wonder. Lewis seems to fall just as Clark’s life was looking up. So maybe—”

Meriwether interrupted, tired of hearing Bill talk. “I loved you, yes, but not like a lover, or if I did love you like that I was lying to even myself about it, which is possible. And I was happy, genuinely, sincerely happy for you when you married, because it made you incredibly happy. But I wonder if you know what it’s like, to see someone who you need for your own happiness being so happy without you. I wonder if you know how that hurts.”

The voice on the other end of the line was hushed. “But what if he couldn’t be completely happy without you, or, rather, Lewis? What if he needed both Lewis and Julia to be happy?”

“Clark, you could have never had both. It was always, _always_ Julia Hancock _or_ Meriwether Lewis. You can’t have both. He had to choose, and he chose her.”

“But what if he _needed_ them both?”

“Damn it! It wasn’t just about him! It never was!”

“. . . oh.”

Meriwether Lewis had a hangover from hell, and it felt good to finally say some of these things. “And one other thing: never, _ever_ take the liberty of assuming that Meriwether Lewis killed himself because of Clark. Believe it or not, Bill, you weren’t the only thing in my world, and all my troubles didn’t revolve around you.”

But maybe Bill had some things he needed to say, too.

“Did you never think about how what you did might affect me? Or might have affected him?”

“Yeah,” Meriwether replied truthfully, “but you didn’t care enough to stay with me, so why the hell should I have cared enough to stick around for you? Most of the time, I was the furthest thing from your mind.”

“That was never true.”

“You never showed me. You never once showed me or told me that you gave a damn about me. Tell me, Bill, exactly how was I supposed to know that you cared?”

“You knew.” Bill was pleading over the phone with a man he’d just met the night before as though he had cared for this stranger all of his life; and maybe he had. “You always knew that I cared about you, that I loved you in some way that I could only do for you.”

Meriwether was stunned to silence by the confession of this man who still denied that he was William Clark.

“You don’t even believe it yet, that you were him,” Meriwether finally said.

Bill didn’t respond to Meriwether’s accusation. “Why did he kill himself, then? If it wasn’t about Clark, then why?”

“I might be honest about it with my Clark, but I’m not going to tell a stranger I met in a bar.”

On the other end of the phone, Bill took a deep breath. “Okay. My girlfriend’s waking up, anyway. I should go.”

“Okay.”

“Well. Bye.”

“Bye.”

As soon as he ended the call, Meriwether Lewis threw his cell phone into the wall across the room, not caring that the battery popped off with the impact.

In spite of himself, he had almost hung up with the words “I love you” on his lips.

-

The night before, Bill Clark had left Meriwether Lewis’s barn retreat and walked along the dirt road from it until he reached the main road, then walked up the road until he reached an intersection with street signs, calling a cab to pick him up there but too busy thinking to explain his strange story to the taxi driver.

He’d taken the cab directly to the apartment that his girlfriend, Julia Hancock, shared with her childhood best friend, Harriet Radford, and let himself in with his spare key quietly at nearly two in the morning. He’d roused Julia from her sleep and made love to her on her bed, neither of them saying a word and both of them falling into profound, deep sleep in each other’s arms following. But Bill had woken early, with the rising sun that turned to gold through the filter of Julia’s yellow gauze curtains, pacing the room silently for half an hour before creeping out, into the small living room that Julia shared with her roommate, Harriet. He sat down in front of Julia’s computer and debated a moment longer before throwing caution to the wind, bringing the machine to life, and spending the next three hours reading every available piece of information he could find on the Internet about William Clark, Meriwether Lewis, and the Corps of Discovery.

Sometime around half past ten, Bill determined he couldn’t stand it any longer, and began looking for Meriwether Lewis’s phone number, in the phone book, in online databases, because the more he had read, the more remarkable it all seemed, but somehow, when he was talking to Meriwether, it all seemed real. Unable to find Meriwether’s number listed, Bill had retreated to the small deck beyond a glass backdoor of the girls’ apartment and resorted to calling the one Thomas Jefferson he found listed in the phone book. Bill recognized the voice from a memory; Mr. Jefferson had been able to give him Meriwether’s number.

But the conversation had not gone as he had hoped. He wanted information; instead, he made confessions.

After hanging up, he crossed his arms and stared mournfully through the glass door into the apartment, until Julia appeared, looking confused by his absence. Then he smiled and went back inside to her.

“I was wondering where you disappeared to,” Julia said as he wrapped his arms around her and kissed her on the forehead.

“I would never leave without saying something, baby, you know that. I just had some phone calls to make.”

“Your boyfriend’s been looking at me funny,” Harriet complained loudly from the sofa, an obvious reminder to the two lovers that she was there.

Bill gave Harriet another look, but Julia ignored her friend, sitting in the recliner and pulling Bill down to sit on the arm of the chair. “Phone calls? To who?”

“Actually, Meriwether Lewis,” Bill admitted, laughing self-consciously and running a hand through his hair. Motions that Julia usually found endearing, but she was not in the mood to be charmed.

“That crazy we met at the bar last night?”

“Yeah.”

“The one you went home with?”

“I didn’t—”

“Bill went home with someone else?” Harriet butted in.

Julia relished telling the story of the night before to her best friend. “Get this. So we went to the bar, right, going to have a few drinks, play some pool, just talk, whatever, right? Only we’re there like ten minutes and suddenly there’s this bar fight, and I’m a little scared, right? But Bill jumps right in and helps break everything up, and it’s like this gang of bikers or something who were beating up this one kid who’s probably not even old enough to be there legally.” Julia made no comment about how she was only eighteen, herself. “And so the manager and all are kicking out the older guys and Bill’s trying to see if the young guy’s okay, right, and the guy just pulls his face down and starts kissing him, _my_ _boyfriend_ , on the disgusting floor of this bar.”

“No!”

“Oh, yeah. And then I start yelling because, uh, excuse me, Bill is _my_ man, and then this kid stands up and starts yelling something about me ‘ruining his life’ and asking if we know who we are and then he goes on like this laughing jag. And I’m pretty terrified, quite frankly, but Bill let me take the truck home and said he was going to help the guy—Meriwether, okay, what kind of name even _is_ that?—home, because, you know, Bill’s just an all-around great guy.” Julia ended her story by wrapping her arm through Bill’s possessively and beaming up at him. “At least, I hope that was the only reason you took him home.”

Bill tried to smile back reassuringly and completely failed.

“You got a boyfriend, Bill?” Harriet inquired, clearly enjoying this all too much.

“Of course not,” he snapped at her.

“Although, thinking about it, you were gone rather a long time. I left the bar to come home at, what, about ten? And you didn’t get here until about two, or maybe a little after.” Julia was getting dangerous, her cool blue eyes narrowing, her voice becoming overly nice. It was kind of terrifying when she got like this, Bill thought, looking at Harriet and pleading with his eyes for her to either help him soothe Julia or leave.

But Harriet just smirked at him.

So much for the loyalty of his supposed future second wife.

“He lives out in the country, so it’s kind of a long drive. Seriously, the man lives in a _barn_. And then it took awhile for the taxi to get there, too, to pick me up. Plus we did talk for a little bit.”

“You _talked_ ,” Julia repeated doubtfully.

“That’s what the kids call it nowadays, huh, Billy boy?”

“If you can’t say something helpful, Harriet, please don’t say anything at all.”

Harriet made a face behind Julia’s back.

“Yeah, well, we talked. See, he’s got this idea, that we’re all these people from history, only we’ve been reincarnated or something. He’s Meriwether Lewis, you see, and I’m William Clark.” Bill bounded up from the chair and across to the sleeping computer, shaking the mouse and waking it to a browser with several tabs opened to biographies of Lewis and Clark online.

Julia watched him blankly.

“Lewis and Clark. Like the explorers,” Harriet realized.

“Exactly!” Bill pointed at her enthusiastically. “And at first I didn’t believe him either, because how crazy is that, right, who the fuck, sorry, who the hell believes in reincarnation or anything? But it kind of makes sense. And then I’ve been reading some stuff—” he gestured to the computer “—this morning and there are really all kinds of crazy coincidences that I can’t explain but they just feel like they make sense this way? Like, get this: the name of William Clark’s first wife was Julia Hancock.”

Julia frowned at him. “Is this supposed to impress me or something?”

But Harriet had made her way over the computer and sat in the chair before it, clicking on different windows, reading snippets from different pages. She paused at a portrait of the explorer William Clark and looked at Bill closely. “Okay, that’s kind of uncanny. I don’t know, there might be something to this, Julia—imagine him about fifteen pounds heavier and ten years older, and Bill would look basically exactly like this,” Harriet said, indicating the picture on the screen.

“Fifteen years older,” Bill corrected vainly.

“Don’t tell me he’s pulling you into all of this bullshit, too, Harriet.”

But Harriet was absorbed in the computer, and Bill pleaded with the skeptical Julia. “I know, it sounds crazy. It still sounds crazy to me, too. But it just feels like there’s something to it, I can’t explain why.”

Harriet snorted and broke the tension between the two. “Says here that Clark’s second wife was one Harriet Radford. How about _no_.”

Julia sank into a thoughtful silence.

Bill laughed it off nervously. “Yeah, I saw that earlier.”

“Oh. Oh, God. That’s why you’ve been staring at me funny all morning, isn’t it?”

“Harriet, come on.”

“Ew. Ew ew ew, _no_. First off, for me to even _think_ about marrying you or doing anything like it with you would require that I liked—”

Bill raised his eyebrows expectantly. Harriet darted a glance at Julia, relieved to see that Julia was still lost deep in her own world and hadn’t been paying much attention to the conversation. “Never mind,” Harriet finished quickly.

Bill leaned over the chair and spoke to her softly. “It also says that Harriet Radford and Julia Hancock were cousins.” Harriet sank slightly into her seat, flushing. “Lucky break that you two aren’t actually this time around, huh?”

Harriet continued to click around on the different tabs and scroll absently as Bill walked over to Julia again, taking her hand and breaking into her thoughts.

“I don’t blame you if you don’t believe it. I’m not sure I do, either. But the coincidences are too weird. And you should hear Meriwether talk about it. He’s just so . . . sure of it all, he speaks with such conviction and belief that I can’t help but—”

He froze as Julia looked up into his eyes. “He just _speaks_ about it and you believe him like this, huh?”

Bill spoke slowly. “Yes.”

“The way you talk about him, it sounds like if he said the word, you’d just follow him to the ends of the earth, wouldn’t you?”

“I think I may have already,” he replied honestly.

Julia scoffed. The hurt was plain in her eyes. “You can’t honestly tell me that all you did was talk to this man. You can’t tell me that you didn’t do something more with him. You trust him too much. You’re too . . . _intimate_ with him.”

Bill kneeled before her, now taking both of her hands in his, and looked her in the eye as he quietly lied to her. “Babe. You know me. You know how I am when I’m . . . satisfied. You saw me when I came to you last night—was I satisfied then?”

At the computer, Harriet tried very hard to block out their conversation entirely.

“No, you definitely didn’t come to me satisfied.”

Bill smiled. “There, now. See? Nothing happened between—”

“You came to me hungry,” Julia continued as though he hadn’t begun to speak. “Hungrier than you would have been for just me, because you’re right, I _do_ know you, Billy, and I know that you’ve never wanted me quite like that.”

Bill considered protesting, saying that he’d wanted her the more because he’d been apart from her, but really, what was the point? Julia knew when he was lying.

“Maybe he tried and he wasn’t good enough for you, or maybe you didn’t ask him, or maybe you did and he said no and you didn’t push him. I don’t know, but I bet it was one of the last two. But I do know you, and I know that, no matter what you try to tell me, you did something other with that boy, or you wanted to. And I really don’t appreciate you lying to me about it. That makes it really hard for me to trust you, and if I can’t trust you, I don’t want to love you.”

Bill nodded. “Okay.”

“I don’t want you to see him or talk to him again. Promise me that?”

There were some things Bill wouldn’t give up. “If I promise you that, I’ll be lying,” he countered. “Because I want to see him again, and I think I need to.”

Julia wasn’t happy, but she accepted it. “Well, thank you for being honest about it, anyway.”

At some point in the conversation, Harriet had stopped pretending not to listen and turned in the chair to watch them instead. In the silence following, she spoke.

“Wait a minute. What you’re basically saying is that Lewis and Clark were, like, overwhelmingly gay for each other, right?” She leaned back in the chair and laughed hard. “This is too good. Why don’t they teach you about these things in American history class?”


End file.
